I'd rather have that, than the way it's been for the past month and a half. Which is why I haven't been playing; I was so disgusted by the fact that they were digging in their heels and telling us to suck it up, that I decided to quit playing completely. I'm only back because Uwk messaged me and let me know that they had finally had a change of heart. I can live with this; they can change it later, as they have time. Which might not be for a while, if they're all working from home. TL;DR: This is better than NO information at all. Much, much better.
Yes.. but now the current tier mats are harder to find in the depot than they were before (and during) the removal of level information on the items. It feels like 1 step foward and 2 back, since we're better than right after they made the change, but worse than before they touched it
Possibly a simple change would be to call PoP level 101, CD level 102, etc. I think that sort of thing has been suggested before, in this and other threads. Yes, it's sort of messy, and it doesn't follow the previous level conventions, but when you freeze the top level for multiple expansions yet still add new mats and different crafting, then it is what it is. I don't know WHY the devs won't consider some of the suggestions I've been reading today in all these tradeskill threads. Many of them are VERY good, and would clear up confusions quite readily. Then again, maybe they are considering them, but they're taking a while to implement. And I'm gonna betcha that very little (if any) of it is going to be able to be worked on while the devs have to work from home.
I'm still not so sure that this was text written to each of the ~340 harvestable node items so much as a procedural text displayed based on itemlevel (an internal value different from leveltouse) or tierXX_harvest classifications. For example, carbonite cluster has an itemlevel of 20 and classifications of metal, raw, harvested, and tier3_harvest. In the course of working with the EQ2 team on Census to produce the best possible public API for how things are internally represented in the game (without revealing anything we shouldn't see) we have occasionally gotten a peek at a few examples of simple Items, Quests, Recipes, Spells, Traits, etc. These have always been in the form of VDL files. VDL is XML in a wrapper. My understanding is that much of EQ2's game data is stored as VDL. EQ2 began development in 1999 and the early 2000's were the absolute height of XML mania. Everyone thought that XML was God's gift to data because it was relatively unrestrictive in what you could store in it. Adding fields and sections didn't require database manipulation or sweeping changes. You could just add it fields willy nilly and then in your code look for its presence and do things if it was there or not. Eventually the software industry outgrew XML and went to serialized data. Relational databases got better able to handle unstructured data. Flat file is hardly dead. Hadoop and MongoDB are two popular examples of massively scaling flat file databases. As far as individual data files that a human might write, JSON has completely supplanted XML in the industry.
PoP and CD are lvl 100-109.. they can't be used for 110+ crafting.. no clue why they got the 110-119 designation
I wish they would fix it so BoL harvests sorted differently from CD and PoP.. like they did before they removed levels in the first place...
